I just read the rest of the scenario....sorry to hog up so much commentary here...I can't believe no one esle is commenting on this!!!

I'm finding the evolution process you are employimng with so many systems, fascinating. The combinations between them, and your rules is quite intriguing, and is resolting in some exciting gaming.

I was actually thinking early on, along the same lines of your reasoning of the two LAWS balancing out the Hummer, but I see and agree with your conclusion. That's very head's up thinking. That said, damn that Hummer covered some impressive ground and reminded me of several movies where one lone vehicle caused much damage on the battlefield....

It leads me to thinking how cinematic your game is. I've been noting that theme pop up here and there around the wargame community, and wondered if it played a part in your development strategy? ...or perhaps it's just an off-shoot interpretation on my part. Either way, I find it very cool.

I'm quite curious to see where you go with Aw Frik ruleset! I love the name too; and the 'friktion' concept!

Whiterook wrote:Yes, I see your point on multiple fire: It's an old chestnut in many wargames where 'firegroups', big and small can really ruin your opponents' day! So now that you know that, as you say... It takes multiple units to stop units in this game ....is that going to affect your ruleset in terms of trying to balance that out a little? ...or, left in place as just another facet of the nastiness of war?

I'm glad you asked. I actually did design it this way, even though I forgot while I was playing it. And the more I played it, the more I felt that many people might find it be to too strange for their taste. But that's ok. I want to put something unique out there, and this certainly is.

What this is meant to simulate is how difficult it really is to totally neutralize opposing forces in a skirmish (or so I hear). Nordic Weasel did this in FiveCore in a totally different way, by making it much easier to cause the enemy to panic and hide than to kill them. I went a different route, by having friction build up that can represent any negative impact, be it panic, injury, death, confusion, you name it. It greatly simplifies things but also provides some realism, because units can swing between positive and negative a number of times during a battle. And so it really does take multiple units to truly stop one unit most of the time. (Or so I hear.)

This might work better for multi-man units, but that also was by design. It makes slightly more sense for a multi-man unit to be hard to kill, because there's more than one guy to kill! But single-man units can be very effective at preserving themselves through hiding and seeking cover, and this system allows that to be abstracted a bit, freeing up the player(s) to think more about tactics and less about exactly what every guy on the table is doing at this moment. Which is just what I wanted.

"...military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood—that serpent's eye that charms to destroy..." --Abraham Lincoln, 1848

Thanks so much for your encouraging commentary! I hope more people discover this game. I usually advertise on The Miniatures Page (which usually brings your forum tons of hits!), but the owner of that page was on vacation and decided not to allow non-paying members to post until his return. Anyway, if you're the one person who downloaded the Aw Frik rules, thank you!

Regarding the cinematic theme and whether it played a role in this game's design...actually, no. I think that was more of a coincidence. I was very inspired by strategic board games, and the friction idea was borrowed from an old set of games from the '80s called Central Front. Another major thrust of my design is allowing heavily damaged units to still be able to cause a small amount of damage, which is something I loved about the first wargame I played called Online Frontlines, a simple hex-and-counter game that used strength points similar to Showers of Blood (the precursor to Aw Frik).

That said, some of my favorite wargaming systems have been very cinematic in nature, particularly Two Hour Wargames and FiveCore. Both of those systems employ mechanics for keeping units on the table despite coming under heavy fire. Not a lot of bloodshed, in other words. FiveCore, especially, makes use of such mechanics because Nordic Weasel thinks that's more realistic. Some of that may have somehow drifted into Aw Frik, but it wasn't intentional. I was really more inspired by the tactics of old-school wargames, and I wanted to bring some of those ideas into miniatures wargaming in a way I hadn't seen before.

"...military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood—that serpent's eye that charms to destroy..." --Abraham Lincoln, 1848